This Is Supposed To Be My Happy Ending?
by TeenTypist
Summary: Hermione is sitting at the Burrow, thinking about the past year, post-war, dissatisfied with life. Ron is doing alright. Harry is running. 1-shot. DH compliant, except for the epilogue. EWE


_**This Is Supposed To Be My Happy Ending?**_

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**Author's Note:** This story is compliant with DH, up until the epilogue. I think this is a far more realistic ending than the epilogue appearing in DH. I'm almost certain I've read that epilogue in some twelve year old girl's fan fiction long before the book came out. Okay, so maybe I didn't, but don't tell me that didn't all sound far too familiar. This is set September 1998.

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Hermione opened her container of take out and rummaged for the plastic fork at the bottom of the bag. Curry chicken and white rice…for the third or fourth time this month. This would be a lot less pathetic if it weren't only the second week of September. She sighed, eating without paying terribly much attention to the taste. Mrs. Weasley would rather have her downstairs for dinner but Hermione wasn't in the mood to face the family.

She'd be nineteen in a week. She was nineteen years old and still living with Ron's family. She really ought to get her own place. That had to be at least the hundredth time she'd thought that. It just seemed so…unnecessary. She reread the letter Harry had left for her—of course he had dropped it off at the Burrow while she was at the office. He had probably Apperated straight to her room—Percy's old room—to avoid having to see anyone else. Or maybe he had sent Hedwig. Who knew? This one didn't have much to say in it. Just that he was alright and he'd come back when he was ready and not before. She added it to the stack of letters in the third drawer of her desk—the Harry drawer. For all his guts when it came to facing down a wand or seven, he still couldn't stand the sight of tears. Trust him to put whatever was difficult to say in writing if he finally came to the conclusion it needed saying.

He'd come back when he was ready. He'd been saying that for several months now. The odds were, that time wasn't coming any time soon. She slipped off her heeled shoes and padded over to the window in her stockings. Tonight was a full moon. It was just barely visible—the days were getting shorter as autumn pressed on, unstoppable, towards winter. Remus had always seemed so logical, so put-together. Her smile had no mirth in it as she wondered if he'd be doing a better job taking care of everyone right now. Would Harry have run off on his watch? Would he have stopped him? Tried to stop him? Would he let him go and trust him to come back when he was ready? _We're all shattered and nobody can put the pieces back together_, she thought. _To put the pieces back together, you have to have all the pieces, and we'll never have them all._

There was a knock on the partially open door and Ginny stuck her head in after a few seconds. "Mum wants to know if—oh, you're already eating."

Hermione sat on her bed, legs swinging. "Tomorrow night. I promise."

"Ron's not home, it's safe to come down."

She shook her head. "It's not that, I swear. Ron and I are getting along alright so long as we don't spend too much time together. He's at Auror training so much I barely see him, no worries." She tried to smile.

Ginny wasn't having it. "Maybe we should get out of here, Hermione. You and I could afford a flat together—a small one. You can't even get all of your books onto the shelves in here." She motioned to the several stacked cardboard boxes of books.

"I'm—"

Ginny waved her hand. "Don't say you're fine or you're happy here, Hermione. We both know _that's_ rubbish. You're not anymore fine than I am." Her eyes were a little red and puffy and Hermione wondered whether that was because Harry had left her a letter, or because he hadn't.

Hermione sighed, taking another bite of curry. "You want some? There's enough for two. You don't have to go down there either."

The redhead's eyes strayed to the drawer where she knew Harry's letters lived. "Did you hear from him today?"

She nodded. "The same as usual." She set her meal down and lay back on the bed, her feet on the floor. "I never thought there'd be a time after this was all over, when the three of us wouldn't be speaking to and seeing each other all the time."

Ginny took a seat at Hermione's desk, fiddling with the knob of the drawer that had Harry's letters, not opening it. She found herself staring at her empty ring finger. She snapped her eyes up, looking at Hermione. She let out an agitated breath. "We were on the good side, weren't we?"

"I think so."

"And we won, didn't we?"

"The Ministry and the _Daily Prophet_ seem to think so."

Ginny glowered at the drawer, as though she could channel her feelings somewhere through it. "Then what the bloody hell happened? I'm hardly eighteen and I've already been engaged and walked out on. I'm living at home; you're here too. If the brightest witch of our generation is living at home with me and not out with some shining career in front of her, what hope do the rest of us have? My whole life is supposed to be in front of me right now and all I see is this miserable gray haze."

Hermione sat up on her elbows smiling bitterly. "I feel worst for Harry. I'm not happy, but I feel like I could be doing something to make myself happier. I could go out and date. Or look for a different job since this one isn't thrilling me. I'm just…not. I've got no one to blame but myself on that account. But Harry…he's not happy and I can't fix him. I hate not being able to fix things. I'm not sure what's worse—knowing that he won't let me try to fix things, or knowing that if he asked, I still couldn't do it. I hate feeling useless." A corner of her mind wandered to a stack of papers she hadn't gotten around to attending to before she left the office. She tried to shake it from her mind.

"He's been gone nearly five months already. Is he ever coming back?"

Hermione could hear the pain in Ginny's voice and didn't quite dare look at her. "Gin, these things happen. War changes people. You guys were apart for a long time, and even though you guys still loved each other…you're both different people now." She could still remember Harry's proposal to Ginny on her seventeenth birthday…and his realization less than three months later that he just wasn't in the right frame of mind for any of it. Ginny had been fighting last year too, but her battle was entirely different. There were things he simply couldn't explain to her. Over Christmas, Ginny confided to Hermione that Harry seemed changed, that she hardly recognized him. Hermione had tried to talk to Harry, told Ginny it should pass, Harry was still processing things. Shortly after Ginny went back to Hogwarts for the spring term, Harry wrote a letter to her, calling off the engagement. Two months later and he walked away from everything, leaving only confused friends and a series of letters behind.

Ginny rested her head on her arms on the desk. "The only one who seems to be adjusting is Ron."

Hermione nodded, slightly envying Ron's detachment. He missed Harry, but he could get along without him in his daily routine—he wasn't overly emotional. He was too busy to be—he had his Auror training taking up his time. Without Harry in the limelight, Ron seemed to be coming into his own. He was even managing not to get too much of a swelled head over it. Hermione looked down at her own left hand, which had, briefly born a ring. They could live together at the Burrow in separate rooms just fine, but living together as a couple, in a flat of their own had been such a disaster…She could still hear her voice, echoing in her ears, shrill as she had ever heard it, shrill as he had ever accused her of being. _I'm not your mother and I'm not picking up after you again; this is our apartment and you have responsibilities. _He had retorted that he didn't need to be picked up after—his clothes could stay right where they were. Day in and day out, they grated on one another's nerves worse and worse until it all came to a head. They were incompatible without an intermediary of some sort—Mrs. Weasley, Harry, separate living spaces.

"Maybe Ron manages because he doesn't have any emotions to get screwed up in the head about. He was never good enough for you, you know."

She smiled at her friend, grateful for trying. "He always did have the emotional range of a teaspoon."

Ginny joined her on the bed and they held hands for a moment. "I thought about going over and seeing Teddy Lupin tomorrow. You want to go with me after work?"

"Sure." She glanced out the window at the moon again, thinking of Remus.

"Mum's going to be mad if I don't get down to dinner soon. Are you sure—?"

"Positive, Gin."

Ginny got up and lingered in the doorway, looking at her friend, noting her haggard expression. She shouldn't look so old at not-quite nineteen. "I can't help thinking, if this was a book, or a movie…we'd have our happy endings. You and Ron would be married, both with good careers. Maybe Quidditch for Ron, and I don't know what for you—I don't know what you want to do. Harry and I would be engaged or married by now. Maybe we'd take care of Teddy. We could have a whole Quidditch team's worth of kids. Harry'd probably be an Auror, hunting down the rest of the of Death Eaters—I'd be worried sick every moment, even though I knew he could take care of himself." She paused, looking up at the ceiling. "We've all been through hell and back. Don't we deserve a happy ending already?"

Hermione picked up her lukewarm dinner, prodding of piece of chicken with her plastic fork and looking up at Ginny. "We deserve one alright. Plenty of people don't get what they deserve—the good things or the bad. All I know is, two years ago, I would have told you that marrying Ron would have been the happy ending for me. I know better now—I know if we'd gone through with it, we'd be miserable right now." She shrugged. She'd just have to see what was around the next bend. Even if Ginny didn't know it now, Hermione was sure that if Harry and Ginny had pursued things, they'd both be worse off for it right now.

Ginny gave her one last look before closing the door and going down the stairs.

She looked down at the takeout container in her hand, and the cramped walls around her. She thought about the remains of the Weasley family, gathered around the table right now, adjusting to the holes that had been created in their lives. This was supposed to be their happy ending? It could be a lot worse; she had no delusions about that. But this wasn't what she was picturing, not by a long shot. Maybe she'd quit tomorrow. Even if she couldn't find all of the broken pieces and put them back together, maybe she could make something new.


End file.
